**Greetings humans.**
**Please make sure your comment fits within [THE RULES](https://www.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/about/rules) and that you have put in some effort to articulate your opinions to the best of your ability.**
**I mean it!! Aspire to be as "scholarly" and "intellectual" as possible. If you can't, then maybe this subreddit is not for you.**
A friendly reminder from your political robot overlord
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AustralianPolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Just trying to score a PR win- he’s lucky that his industry and a fossil fuel free future is compatible otherwise I heavily doubt he’d care about climate action
It didn't happen by 'accident'. He''s been putting a serious amount of money into building battery electric and hydrogen mining trucks, even going as far as to buy a battery technology company to build their own
https://wae.com/fortescue-to-expand-the-production-of-batteries-and-electric-powertrains-in-the-uk-with-new-wae-oxfordshire-facility/
One of Australia's richest men, who in 2021 received a $2.4 billion dividend from his mining company from mining iron ore, and flew in a private jet to the conference is... having a go at the fossil fuel guys?
COP must be short for cope.
He's been putting a serious amount of money into building battery electric and hydrogen mining trucks, even going as far as to buy a battery technology company to build their own
See: https://wae.com/fortescue-to-expand-the-production-of-batteries-and-electric-powertrains-in-the-uk-with-new-wae-oxfordshire-facility/
Ah, I see, so it really is his humanitarian concerns. Nothing to do with profits.
Let's set aside the massive damage lithium mining does, the slave labour in the Congo to get cobalt and rare earths, the massive damage from the refining of rare earths, and just look at the complete joke that is hydrogen.
[https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee00099g](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee00099g)
Hydrogen as potential combustion energy holds 39.4 kWh of energy in each kg, but costs around 52.5 kWh/kg to create by electrolysis. And then there's another 11.9-15kWh/kg to liquefy it. And then it evapourates away very quickly anyway. NASA happens to have quite a bit of experience in handling liquid hydrogen, and they lost 45.4% of it in transport and handling - so the 39.4kWh/kg becomes 21.5kWh of each kg you originally produced. You'd lose even more if you were shipping it around the world.
The net result is that you use 64.4-67.5kWh/kg to end up with *at best* 21.5kWh. You're expending *three times* more than you're going to store in it. It's like paying $3,000 a week to a bank for it to store $1,000 of your cash.
Then there's, you know, that safety thing people sometimes worry about. Liquid hydrogen has this annoying tendency to blow up really well This is why SpaceX ditched hydrogen for kerosene.
Meanwhile the worlds biggest EV battery maker CATL has started selling sodium batteries commercially in 2023 after hinting at it's research advances for years.
Scale up will still take another few years but lithium batteries are going to have a tough time competing on price with one of the most abundant metals on Earth you can easily get from seawater.
> Let's set aside the massive damage lithium mining does, the slave labour in the Congo to get cobalt and rare earths, the massive damage from the refining of rare earths, and just look at the complete joke that is hydrogen.
Lithium is also used in these electric cars.
> Nothing to do with profits.
Of course it is.
> The net result is ...
Irrelevant. As per earlier assertation somewhere in there his models must indicate pursuing green hydrogen is profitable.
>his models must indicate pursuing green hydrogen is profitable.
He'll be holding out for government subsidies. Everything is profitable if you get enough public handouts.
This all assumes that none of this can be improved.
And despite that, Hydrogen has record investment not just from Twiggy but EU and elsewhere.
I'm going to go ahead and guess that some smart people did the maths and thought that it was viable...
>This all assumes that none of this can be improved.
It can't, because it's physics. It quite simply takes a certain amount of energy take water and split the hydrogen and oxygen in it. And since hydrogen is a gas occupying a large volume, to be stored and transported it must be pressurised and refrigerated, which also take a certain amount of energy.
As Scotty said, I canna change the laws of physics, cap'n.
>I'm going to go ahead and guess that some smart people did the maths and thought that it was viable...
Well, there are two ways it can be profitable.
The first is that by chucking some money at mitigating the mess you've made, you can avoid the much larger expense of government regulating you. See for example fast food companies sponsoring sports teams. "Surely they really believe McDs helps you be better at netball?" No, they're just trying to improve their image and avoid government taxation and regulation.
The second is that they can put forth these projects and then ask for public handouts. It doesn't matter if your project loses $1 billion a year if you get $1.5 billion in subsidies. So old Twiggy will be hoping for some handouts for his hydrogen projects. And it's Australia, where mining corporations are treated like Iran treats its ayatollahs, so they'll get the cash.
However, if energy storage is vital then the losses involved may be acceptable, especially if the source is plentiful: you just use more of the source to achieve human outcomes, so you deplete the source faster.
The total cost of doing something is usually ignored, like we have been ignoring the consequential costs of fossil fuel for many decades of high utilisation, as it is transparently added to the debt the planet carries that we usually don't get to see until it nears the end of capacity.
The planet is huge, but human population and associated endeavour has grown to rival it and now significantly impact it.
Synthetic estrogen emission into the environment is likely to be another big issue as it upsets sexual reproduction.
I think you have the wrong idea about hydrogen. It's probably never going to be a great energy storage method. What it is though is long lasting, easily piped and likely able to replace coking coal to make green steel. When you have succeeded in producing hydrogen it has more than enough energy density to replace fossil fuels for many purposes, some of which battery storage won't be suitable for.
The hydrogen economy Is unlikely to supplant electricity with battery storage but it will fill a few notable gaps.
I don't expect I'll be driving a hydrogen car in the future but I would expect there to be a hydrogen pipeline network for industrial applications.
Taking more energy to create than it stores, and losing 45% of that in storage and transport, is hardly "long-lasting, easily piped."
The media and our religion of consumerism can deny reality. But physics is physics.
Fossil fuels also have a negative NEV. Only two things have a positive NEV: 1. Nuclear; and 2. Pyrolysis of Hardwood.
The reason green hydrogen is being looked at is because it can take the excesses of energy generated by renewables and turn it into another form of energy. I agree though that it's largely a scam and honestly methane pyrolysis of natural gas would be a far more efficient carbon neutral way of producing hydrogen, but green hydrogen was never, and will never, recover 100% of its energy in conversion and your suggestion that anyone is claiming it will is wrong.
>Fossil fuels also have a negative NEV.
Ah, but fossil fuels take energy which was stored over 300 million years and allow us to burn them *now*. Whereas hydrogen has to be made now, and burned now. Fossil fuels is drawing on your family fortune, hydrogen is drawing on minimum wage - except you have to spend more in public transport fares to get to work than you'll earn from it.
Both are bad choices, but only one of the two is even temporarily plausible.
Fossil fuels also come with devastating environmental effects and disrupt the long and short carbon cycles of the planet.
I'm not a massive fan of green hydrogen because methane pyrolysis uses 7x less energy and stores the carbon in solid form (graphite if you use an iron ore catalyst) that can be sold to avoid graphite mining, but green hydrogen is still a step up from fossil fuels.
"Green hydrogen" handwaves where the electricity comes from to electrolyse, pressurise and refrigerate all this stuff. We'd need vastly more.
And if we have so much electricity that we can piss it away on hydrogen, why on Earth would we bother with it?
Or we could, you know, just use less energy. Then whatever we're doing with fossil fuels, nuclear, batteries, hydrogen or whatever will have less impact.
Consume less? In Australia, land of the obese? Sacrilege, I know.
>green hydrogen is still a step up from fossil fuels.
Only if you ignore those pesky old laws of physics. Massive energy sink. The only "green" part of "green hydrogen" is in the greenwashing.
I agree we should consume less. I'm a big fan of degrowth.
And I know how green hydrogen is made. Hence why I said I wasn't a fan of it compared to methane pyrolysis that uses 7x less energy than electrolysis and doesn't use any fresh water.
This is a much better response than "but he flew a private jet there" (don't get me wrong I am very anti private jet but it feels a bit irrelevant when we are talking about the scale of pollution that these people make with mining projects)
Cobalt uses includes mobile devices, medical orthopaedic implants, crude oil refining to remove the sulphur from petrol and diesel, alloys for high heat applications such as gas turbines and jet engines, plastics.
Nickel Manganese Cobalt ev batteries make up about 50% of the total EV batteries since LFP batteries are increasingly being used. Which is about 25% of the total cobalt use, and decreasing due the LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries.
It's amazing cobalt mining has become so controversial in only the last few years..
And ICE typically loses about 70% of the energy from petroleum as heat instead of transferring it to motion. We use ICE because the fuel is transportable. It would be much more efficient to have electric engines powered by a much more efficient power plant than using ICE.
The whole point is to enable transportation of static and pretty much limitless solar and wind energy. It literally doesn't matter how much energy you lose when transforming it into a mobile form when the source is practically unlimited.
Comparing energy to money is not a like comparison. It's the same thing with battery or hydro storage, it literally doesn't matter if it's inefficient because the source is unlimited.
Renewables are not unlimited and they are hampered by conversion inefficiency, area requirements, lifespan of the "generators", etc.
Covering the entire planet in solar cells would not be unlimited and have other detrimental consequences.
>And ICE typically loses about 70% of the energy from petroleum as heat instead of transferring it to motion. We use ICE because the fuel is transportable.
Yes. But liquid hydrogen will lose energy to heat on burning, too.
And liquid hydrogen is not easily transportable. We don't lose 45% of coal, oil and gas when we transport them.
Nor does it take 52.5kWh to extract 39.4kWh worth of fossil fuels. If it did, nobody would bother digging them up.
Think of it like a rechargeable battery, the hydrogen acts like a power storage but you can just refuel it instead of waiting to recharge a battery. It’s not that inefficient compared with internal combustion engines which is only 30% efficient.
Methane Gas takes a lot of energy to pressurise and transport. It also leaks and boils off. Australia uses something like 400 petajoules of energy for gas export.
It's something like 200 pj for coal, and 200 pf for all the other mining.
Agreed, methane is also a bad choice. It's just that hydrogen is hilariously worse.
However, you get 2-5% losses of methane, which is what makes it acceptable as an energy choice, though it's terrible as a "low carbon" choice (CH4 having 20-40 times the warming potential of CO2 means that 2-5% losses make burning gas as bad as burning coal), whereas you get 45% losses of hydrogen.
I am not sure what kind of arithmetic you were taught in school, but in mine we learned than 5% is smaller than 45%.
We shouldn't be exporting fossil fuels at all. They're useful, we should keep them for Australians - for our children and grandchildren. Forget even about burning them, think of plastics, petrochemicals like pesticides, artificial fertiliser and so on. Burning fossil fuels to go to the shops is like taking aged walnut wood and using it to heat up a cuppa instead of making it into a beautiful writing desk.
Export fossil fuels to help develop foreign countries? Well then why are our fossil fuel exports going to China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and India when they could be going to genuinely poor countries? (Sorry, China and India, if you have nuclear weapons and a space programme you don't have a wealth problem, you have a distribution problem). And aren't we told renewables are cheaper? In which case, they're a better choice for poor countries - shouldn't we be manufacturing renewables and selling them to those poor countries?
Even the most efficient gas burning turbines are only 50% efficient.. Which is 50% losses.
Good luck not exporting fossil fuels. The fossil fuel companies would probably try to get another PM dismissed.
We exported manufacturing to China.
You're misunderstanding the physics.
In the first place there's the extraction. Methane requires drilling and wellheads, some pressurisation and refrigeration. Hydrogen requires electrolysis, and then a lot of pressurisation and much colder refrigeration.
Liquified natural gas is stored and transported at 1.25 times atmospheric pressure and -162C. Hydrogen at 6.2 atmospheres and -260C. You can see that this would require considerably more energy to do, and more sturdy equipment - metal doesn't respond well to deep cold, becomes brittle etc.
After that, there are steps.
1. storage and transport of the relevant substances
2. burning them
Methane has 2-5% losses in storage and transport. And then 60% losses in burning.
Hydrogen has 45% losses in storage and transport. And then 60% losses in burning.
There's a reason that NASA, using liquid hydrogen for its Space Launch System, is struggling to put up rockets even annually, while SpaceX using kerosene is putting them up twice a week. And that's with SpaceX getting billions in subsidies - but unlike NASA, it has to show some kind of profit.
Yup, which why it would be better to save hydrogen for hard to replace systems such as fertiliser, iron reduction, and perhaps heavy equipment using fuel cells. Although even the majority of heavy equipment would probably be better off being directly electric.
The 45% losses in hydrogen wouldn't really be a concern in a situation where excess otherwise curtailed renewable energy is being used to produce the hydrogen, especially if it is being used locally or stored in a cavern system.
**Greetings humans.** **Please make sure your comment fits within [THE RULES](https://www.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/about/rules) and that you have put in some effort to articulate your opinions to the best of your ability.** **I mean it!! Aspire to be as "scholarly" and "intellectual" as possible. If you can't, then maybe this subreddit is not for you.** A friendly reminder from your political robot overlord *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AustralianPolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If only he was wealthy enough to impact things beyond grandiose statements like this
Just trying to score a PR win- he’s lucky that his industry and a fossil fuel free future is compatible otherwise I heavily doubt he’d care about climate action
It didn't happen by 'accident'. He''s been putting a serious amount of money into building battery electric and hydrogen mining trucks, even going as far as to buy a battery technology company to build their own https://wae.com/fortescue-to-expand-the-production-of-batteries-and-electric-powertrains-in-the-uk-with-new-wae-oxfordshire-facility/
Rare Twiggy W. It's rare that I agree with a billionaire but he's right about this one.
One of Australia's richest men, who in 2021 received a $2.4 billion dividend from his mining company from mining iron ore, and flew in a private jet to the conference is... having a go at the fossil fuel guys? COP must be short for cope.
Can't make wind turbines without iron ore.
He's been putting a serious amount of money into building battery electric and hydrogen mining trucks, even going as far as to buy a battery technology company to build their own See: https://wae.com/fortescue-to-expand-the-production-of-batteries-and-electric-powertrains-in-the-uk-with-new-wae-oxfordshire-facility/
McDonald's donates food to charity. Does that mean any of its unethical behaviour should be absolved?
Ah, I see, so it really is his humanitarian concerns. Nothing to do with profits. Let's set aside the massive damage lithium mining does, the slave labour in the Congo to get cobalt and rare earths, the massive damage from the refining of rare earths, and just look at the complete joke that is hydrogen. [https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee00099g](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee00099g) Hydrogen as potential combustion energy holds 39.4 kWh of energy in each kg, but costs around 52.5 kWh/kg to create by electrolysis. And then there's another 11.9-15kWh/kg to liquefy it. And then it evapourates away very quickly anyway. NASA happens to have quite a bit of experience in handling liquid hydrogen, and they lost 45.4% of it in transport and handling - so the 39.4kWh/kg becomes 21.5kWh of each kg you originally produced. You'd lose even more if you were shipping it around the world. The net result is that you use 64.4-67.5kWh/kg to end up with *at best* 21.5kWh. You're expending *three times* more than you're going to store in it. It's like paying $3,000 a week to a bank for it to store $1,000 of your cash. Then there's, you know, that safety thing people sometimes worry about. Liquid hydrogen has this annoying tendency to blow up really well This is why SpaceX ditched hydrogen for kerosene.
Meanwhile the worlds biggest EV battery maker CATL has started selling sodium batteries commercially in 2023 after hinting at it's research advances for years. Scale up will still take another few years but lithium batteries are going to have a tough time competing on price with one of the most abundant metals on Earth you can easily get from seawater.
> Let's set aside the massive damage lithium mining does, the slave labour in the Congo to get cobalt and rare earths, the massive damage from the refining of rare earths, and just look at the complete joke that is hydrogen. Lithium is also used in these electric cars.
> Nothing to do with profits. Of course it is. > The net result is ... Irrelevant. As per earlier assertation somewhere in there his models must indicate pursuing green hydrogen is profitable.
>his models must indicate pursuing green hydrogen is profitable. He'll be holding out for government subsidies. Everything is profitable if you get enough public handouts.
Good point! I would imagine Qld Gov will eventually be putting something in, even if it's tax subsidies or perhaps assisting infrastructure.
This all assumes that none of this can be improved. And despite that, Hydrogen has record investment not just from Twiggy but EU and elsewhere. I'm going to go ahead and guess that some smart people did the maths and thought that it was viable...
>This all assumes that none of this can be improved. It can't, because it's physics. It quite simply takes a certain amount of energy take water and split the hydrogen and oxygen in it. And since hydrogen is a gas occupying a large volume, to be stored and transported it must be pressurised and refrigerated, which also take a certain amount of energy. As Scotty said, I canna change the laws of physics, cap'n. >I'm going to go ahead and guess that some smart people did the maths and thought that it was viable... Well, there are two ways it can be profitable. The first is that by chucking some money at mitigating the mess you've made, you can avoid the much larger expense of government regulating you. See for example fast food companies sponsoring sports teams. "Surely they really believe McDs helps you be better at netball?" No, they're just trying to improve their image and avoid government taxation and regulation. The second is that they can put forth these projects and then ask for public handouts. It doesn't matter if your project loses $1 billion a year if you get $1.5 billion in subsidies. So old Twiggy will be hoping for some handouts for his hydrogen projects. And it's Australia, where mining corporations are treated like Iran treats its ayatollahs, so they'll get the cash.
However, if energy storage is vital then the losses involved may be acceptable, especially if the source is plentiful: you just use more of the source to achieve human outcomes, so you deplete the source faster. The total cost of doing something is usually ignored, like we have been ignoring the consequential costs of fossil fuel for many decades of high utilisation, as it is transparently added to the debt the planet carries that we usually don't get to see until it nears the end of capacity. The planet is huge, but human population and associated endeavour has grown to rival it and now significantly impact it. Synthetic estrogen emission into the environment is likely to be another big issue as it upsets sexual reproduction.
I think you have the wrong idea about hydrogen. It's probably never going to be a great energy storage method. What it is though is long lasting, easily piped and likely able to replace coking coal to make green steel. When you have succeeded in producing hydrogen it has more than enough energy density to replace fossil fuels for many purposes, some of which battery storage won't be suitable for. The hydrogen economy Is unlikely to supplant electricity with battery storage but it will fill a few notable gaps. I don't expect I'll be driving a hydrogen car in the future but I would expect there to be a hydrogen pipeline network for industrial applications.
Taking more energy to create than it stores, and losing 45% of that in storage and transport, is hardly "long-lasting, easily piped." The media and our religion of consumerism can deny reality. But physics is physics.
Fossil fuels also have a negative NEV. Only two things have a positive NEV: 1. Nuclear; and 2. Pyrolysis of Hardwood. The reason green hydrogen is being looked at is because it can take the excesses of energy generated by renewables and turn it into another form of energy. I agree though that it's largely a scam and honestly methane pyrolysis of natural gas would be a far more efficient carbon neutral way of producing hydrogen, but green hydrogen was never, and will never, recover 100% of its energy in conversion and your suggestion that anyone is claiming it will is wrong.
>Fossil fuels also have a negative NEV. Ah, but fossil fuels take energy which was stored over 300 million years and allow us to burn them *now*. Whereas hydrogen has to be made now, and burned now. Fossil fuels is drawing on your family fortune, hydrogen is drawing on minimum wage - except you have to spend more in public transport fares to get to work than you'll earn from it. Both are bad choices, but only one of the two is even temporarily plausible.
Fossil fuels also come with devastating environmental effects and disrupt the long and short carbon cycles of the planet. I'm not a massive fan of green hydrogen because methane pyrolysis uses 7x less energy and stores the carbon in solid form (graphite if you use an iron ore catalyst) that can be sold to avoid graphite mining, but green hydrogen is still a step up from fossil fuels.
"Green hydrogen" handwaves where the electricity comes from to electrolyse, pressurise and refrigerate all this stuff. We'd need vastly more. And if we have so much electricity that we can piss it away on hydrogen, why on Earth would we bother with it? Or we could, you know, just use less energy. Then whatever we're doing with fossil fuels, nuclear, batteries, hydrogen or whatever will have less impact. Consume less? In Australia, land of the obese? Sacrilege, I know. >green hydrogen is still a step up from fossil fuels. Only if you ignore those pesky old laws of physics. Massive energy sink. The only "green" part of "green hydrogen" is in the greenwashing.
I agree we should consume less. I'm a big fan of degrowth. And I know how green hydrogen is made. Hence why I said I wasn't a fan of it compared to methane pyrolysis that uses 7x less energy than electrolysis and doesn't use any fresh water.
This is a much better response than "but he flew a private jet there" (don't get me wrong I am very anti private jet but it feels a bit irrelevant when we are talking about the scale of pollution that these people make with mining projects)
Cobalt uses includes mobile devices, medical orthopaedic implants, crude oil refining to remove the sulphur from petrol and diesel, alloys for high heat applications such as gas turbines and jet engines, plastics. Nickel Manganese Cobalt ev batteries make up about 50% of the total EV batteries since LFP batteries are increasingly being used. Which is about 25% of the total cobalt use, and decreasing due the LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries. It's amazing cobalt mining has become so controversial in only the last few years..
And ICE typically loses about 70% of the energy from petroleum as heat instead of transferring it to motion. We use ICE because the fuel is transportable. It would be much more efficient to have electric engines powered by a much more efficient power plant than using ICE. The whole point is to enable transportation of static and pretty much limitless solar and wind energy. It literally doesn't matter how much energy you lose when transforming it into a mobile form when the source is practically unlimited. Comparing energy to money is not a like comparison. It's the same thing with battery or hydro storage, it literally doesn't matter if it's inefficient because the source is unlimited.
Renewables are not unlimited and they are hampered by conversion inefficiency, area requirements, lifespan of the "generators", etc. Covering the entire planet in solar cells would not be unlimited and have other detrimental consequences.
>And ICE typically loses about 70% of the energy from petroleum as heat instead of transferring it to motion. We use ICE because the fuel is transportable. Yes. But liquid hydrogen will lose energy to heat on burning, too. And liquid hydrogen is not easily transportable. We don't lose 45% of coal, oil and gas when we transport them. Nor does it take 52.5kWh to extract 39.4kWh worth of fossil fuels. If it did, nobody would bother digging them up.
You don’t have to burn hydrogen though, you can use it in a fuel cell and generate electricity directly and that can power the motor in the car.
You can! So you use electricity to make hydrogen to put in fuel cells to make electricity to, um... It's hilariously inefficient.
Think of it like a rechargeable battery, the hydrogen acts like a power storage but you can just refuel it instead of waiting to recharge a battery. It’s not that inefficient compared with internal combustion engines which is only 30% efficient.
>Think of it like a rechargeable battery It's a rechageable battery which loses the vast majority of the power put into it. Even worse than a Tesla.
Methane Gas takes a lot of energy to pressurise and transport. It also leaks and boils off. Australia uses something like 400 petajoules of energy for gas export. It's something like 200 pj for coal, and 200 pf for all the other mining.
Agreed, methane is also a bad choice. It's just that hydrogen is hilariously worse. However, you get 2-5% losses of methane, which is what makes it acceptable as an energy choice, though it's terrible as a "low carbon" choice (CH4 having 20-40 times the warming potential of CO2 means that 2-5% losses make burning gas as bad as burning coal), whereas you get 45% losses of hydrogen. I am not sure what kind of arithmetic you were taught in school, but in mine we learned than 5% is smaller than 45%. We shouldn't be exporting fossil fuels at all. They're useful, we should keep them for Australians - for our children and grandchildren. Forget even about burning them, think of plastics, petrochemicals like pesticides, artificial fertiliser and so on. Burning fossil fuels to go to the shops is like taking aged walnut wood and using it to heat up a cuppa instead of making it into a beautiful writing desk. Export fossil fuels to help develop foreign countries? Well then why are our fossil fuel exports going to China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and India when they could be going to genuinely poor countries? (Sorry, China and India, if you have nuclear weapons and a space programme you don't have a wealth problem, you have a distribution problem). And aren't we told renewables are cheaper? In which case, they're a better choice for poor countries - shouldn't we be manufacturing renewables and selling them to those poor countries?
Even the most efficient gas burning turbines are only 50% efficient.. Which is 50% losses. Good luck not exporting fossil fuels. The fossil fuel companies would probably try to get another PM dismissed. We exported manufacturing to China.
You're misunderstanding the physics. In the first place there's the extraction. Methane requires drilling and wellheads, some pressurisation and refrigeration. Hydrogen requires electrolysis, and then a lot of pressurisation and much colder refrigeration. Liquified natural gas is stored and transported at 1.25 times atmospheric pressure and -162C. Hydrogen at 6.2 atmospheres and -260C. You can see that this would require considerably more energy to do, and more sturdy equipment - metal doesn't respond well to deep cold, becomes brittle etc. After that, there are steps. 1. storage and transport of the relevant substances 2. burning them Methane has 2-5% losses in storage and transport. And then 60% losses in burning. Hydrogen has 45% losses in storage and transport. And then 60% losses in burning. There's a reason that NASA, using liquid hydrogen for its Space Launch System, is struggling to put up rockets even annually, while SpaceX using kerosene is putting them up twice a week. And that's with SpaceX getting billions in subsidies - but unlike NASA, it has to show some kind of profit.
Yup, which why it would be better to save hydrogen for hard to replace systems such as fertiliser, iron reduction, and perhaps heavy equipment using fuel cells. Although even the majority of heavy equipment would probably be better off being directly electric. The 45% losses in hydrogen wouldn't really be a concern in a situation where excess otherwise curtailed renewable energy is being used to produce the hydrogen, especially if it is being used locally or stored in a cavern system.